


Our Lives are Bloody Bohemian Rhapsody

by thealexandriaarchives



Category: Black Books, Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Supernatural
Genre: (To Rule Them All), Also Bernard Black Shows Up, Apocalypses, Bobby is Aziraphale, M/M, Queen - Freeform, Soul Melding, There is Only One Crowley, kind of.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-17
Updated: 2013-09-07
Packaged: 2017-11-18 21:45:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thealexandriaarchives/pseuds/thealexandriaarchives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With the Apocalypse looming again, Aziraphale's nowhere to be found. Not that Crowley's worried, mind you. Or getting overly curious about the hunter with the dusty old books who speaks Japanese with a British accent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all! This fic is officially abandoned 2.25 chapters in! Sorry about that, but it's definite.

Aziraphale wasn’t the first to fall.

A few of the younger, more brash angels had in the early days, when war was just starting to loom on the horizon, and the archangels started to loose whispers that is was time to try again. 

They made spectacles of themselves, trying to draw as much attention as possible. 

More than once they would come to Aziraphale first, appearing uncomfortably in the middle of crowded book stacks, entreaties for him to join them on their lips.

Aziraphale made them all a cup of tea, listened politely to their passionate pleas, and firmly informed them that he was out of the Apocalypse-stopping business, thank you very much, and he was certain they could handle it.

They would leave, albeit reluctantly, and he would close shop, find his good tartan scarf, and pop out to Japan for sushi and those marvelous little rice candies.

Might as well get them while he could.

These attempted martyrdoms didn’t stick.

The few who braved the disapproval of their superiors to attend the gruesome displays came away disturbed, but not moved to action.

If anything, the support for the War, for a final stop to the death of their brothers and sisters, grew.

But Aziraphale continued quietly, despite the increased suspicions placed upon his involvement with the dissenters. Once a Troublemaker, rattling against the Ineffable Plan, always a Troublemaker, with a capital T.

Then a garrison leader named Anna fell, and Aziraphale received orders to report back immediately.

He sold the shop for a pound to his favorite customer, a young man by the name of Mr. Black, who seemed to appreciate the place just the way it was: dark, musty, and with those lovely mollusks on the walls. Best of all, so long as Aziraphale let him smoke and drink in the corner, he never tried to buy anything.

He tied his scarf and took a last fond look around the crowded London square, then appeared Above to a tribunal of his superiors.

He hesitated fractionally as he reached within himself to draw out that hidden place where his grace resided, questioning his own resolve. His eyes caught Zachariah’s sneer, and he went through with it.

After all, he had a very good friend who’d done this, and he said it hadn’t been so bad.

 _Of course_ , Aziraphale reflected, as the worst, most marrow-sickeningly _wrong_ pain he’d ever known coursed through his very being, _That particular friend was not the most reliable source he’d ever known._

_  
_

* * * * *

 

Crowley wasn’t worried.

He hadn’t really kept up with the Angel since their last little adventure, but that wasn’t particularly unusual.

They’d gone whole centuries before meeting up again, and to be blunt, the last time they’d joined up the fallout had been just fan-fucking-tastic.

He’d spent the past decades narrowly dodging the worst parts of the pit by rebuilding his credibility and proving some decidedly unsavory loyalties to make it to the title of ‘King of the Crossroads’, where no one questioned his fondness for staying topside, murmurs about his treachery and _cowardice_ in halting the war immediately fell silent within a half-mile radius, and the few stupid gits who still spat out the name ‘Angel-fucker’ got special attention in his private dungeons.

Crowley had spent most of his very long life without motivation to ladder climb, but since he’d been pushed into it out of sheer survival instinct, he had to admit: The Perks Weren’t Bad.

He’d half heard, half assumed based on the Angel’s annoyingly stable personality, that Aziraphale was lying low, waiting for the wrath of Above and Below to blow over.

But when the excited ramblings of the short-sighted fanatics grew to a swell after Lilith’s death and Lucifer’s rising, he seals a deal with a Greco-Roman scholar for three intact scrolls from the Library of Alexandria, pre-torching, and is hit by the realization that he has far bigger problems than slanderous gossip about fraternization with the Other Side, and an emotion he refuses to categorize as nostalgia.

He finds himself outside a dingy bookshop in SoHo, ignoring the new sign and eyeing the irascible Irishman behind the desk.

He’s not worried.

But he does accept the offer of a drink, on the condition he not try to buy anything.

 

* * * * *

 

Falling, the actual falling part, wasn’t much fun either.

It wasn’t so much the nauseating speed, the burn of re-entry, or even the lingering pain and numb, growing shock and unavoidable regret.

What bothered Aziraphale was not knowing where he would hit, or who he would be.

Those who fell before had found some newly forming soul to cling to, shaping and merging with it to become new versions of themselves.

But even now _they_ wouldn’t leave him alone. They’d follow him wherever he landed and get rid of him quietly, no possibility of returning or martyrdom left open.

The only other choice was… a bit distasteful.

To find a soul still tethered to its body after death, before the reapers could arrive to do their work.

It was unnatural, and rarely done. To prevent a soul from reaching its natural destination after its time had come… most shied away from such a prospect, and the reapers’ understandable ire.

But, weighing the odds of the success of his escape, Aziraphale preferred it to ending a life not yet begun.

He reached out for the newly formed confusion and pain of the recently deceased, and one fading light shone more solidly than the rest.

He was in a farmhouse in South Dakota, which held all the lovely feelings of a good home.

But layers of dust had begun to settle over the highly polished wood, the smell of fresh baked pies barely clung to the tidy kitchen, and the faintest tinge of sulfur and fear hung in the halls.

In the living room he found what he was looking for.

A man lay face down on the floor, surrounded by empty whiskey bottles, lying on an open leather-bound book.

Aziraphale looked: a basic exorcism, increasingly shaky notes lining the margins. It doesn’t matter. The translation is poor, and even corrected it would be useless against any but the lowest form of demons.

The man’s spirit stood against the wall, hands in the pockets of a grease-stained jacket, a faded baseball cap on his head.

“Damn stupid way to go, alcohol poisoning. Don’t know what I was really expecting.”

He observed Aziraphale a for a moment. The angel’s not sure what he’s seeing. Without a vessel, without his grace… he can already feel himself dissipating.

“You Death or something? Bit less impressive than the press, no offense.”

Aziraphale nearly smiled. “No, I’m not. Death very rarely makes personal appearances these days, but I’m not here on his behalf either.”

The man waited, looking faintly annoyed.

Aziraphale tried to clear his throat, before remembering he no longer had one.

“I’m… here to offer you a deal.”

The horrible feeling that Crowley would approve of him fell over the newly-fallen angel.

“I… need a place to hide for a while, and if you allow me to do so with you, I can offer you another chance at your life.”

The man frowned suspiciously. “Why ask first?”

Aziraphale was too tired to be offended.

“Because if you say no I don’t want to… impose. I don’t even know if I could.”

The man looked between him and the body on the floor a few times.

“Aw, hell. I’ll probably regret this, but all right.”

The angel could feel his edges begin to go fuzzy, but he had to ask.

“Why are you so interested in going back?”

The spirit’s gaze didn’t move from the useless tome beneath his corpse.

“I haven’t done anything to make myself useful yet.”

Ignoring the niggling feeling that that mostly harmless answer would come back to haunt him, Aziraphale reached for the spirit.

 

* * * * *

 

Bobby Singer woke with his face stuck to yellowing parchment and the sour taste of regurgitated whiskey in his mouth.

Stretching, he reached for something to rinse the taste from his mouth. All the bottles were empty and he suddenly had no desire to grab a new one. Rising to his feet, he headed for the bathroom to clean up.

Half an hour later, he came out, feeling better than he had in days, clean down to scrubbing the motor oil out of his cuticles, but exhausted.

Looking down at the book still open on the floor, he noticed his mistake in the translation. It would probably be better to get his hands on a copy of the Lesser Key of Solomon though, and use the Latin derivative of the Enochian...

Thoughts racing, he grabbed a pen and bent down to take fresh notes, ignoring the new, calm little voice in the back of his mind that said he should sleep.

A few miles away lightning crashed and windows shattered.

The voice went silent, digging deeper into the corners of his mind.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good ...You-Know-Who, all! Chapter Two was determined to be a stick in my backside!! Chapter three is already written, don't worry. It'll be up after a quick revamp.

In terms of pure nastiness, Crowley hasn’t been able to identify which is worse: Wars involving human religious fanatics, or wars involving demonic factions of religious fanatics.

He’s been involved on the fringes of both a few times, try as he might to keep out them, and the only definitive answer he can come up with is ‘Bugger them all while they’re not looking’.

After Azazel loses his stranglehold on the Satan worshippers, there’s another civil war, if it can really be called that. It’s more of a collection of riots and lynchings up and down the circles of the pit.

Crowley, as a known angel-sympathizer, human lover, apocalypse stopper, and all around advocate of the world as it is not collapsing into the _loveliness_ down below, got singled out for special attention near the beginning.

The fact that he was one of the few who’d been round at the Beginning, and recognized Lucifer as the twat he really was likely didn’t help his case as a heretic.

(His true origin as the last of the Fallen had mercifully, after centuries of hard work, been completely obliterated, with a few false trails for those young upstarts with more brains than sense.)

What’s a demon to do when a silver tongue (notoriously ineffective against already motivated mobs) is the only weapon left honed after decades of keeping his nose down?

He has absolutely no shame in admitting he ran and hid behind Lilith’s skirts.

She may have been a nutter too, but at least she was smart enough to recognize talent and a healthy dose of survival interest.

After she’d restored what passed for order in the Pit, he’d thanked her with loyalty (Well, sort of…) and a hellhound pup from his personal kennel.

He started breeding them in earnest after that, handing them out right and left to people whose allegiance he wanted to secure, or who seemed like they might be growing suspicious of his.

And no, the irony of reasserting his position with hellhounds was not lost on him.

And if the pups might have an overriding loyalty to turn on their masters if ordered against him, well… that was just common sense.

But when Lilith fell too, and all but a few of the stupidest, most loyal minions jumped over her second in command to fawn over ‘Daddy’, Crowley stepped back to look at the situation, took another hopeful look at a bookshop with more dust than paper, and started laying breadcrumbs for the Winchesters.

 

* * * * *

 

The first time the King of the Crossroads and Bobby Singer meet leaves no deep impressions. They both see what they’d expected.

One sees a jumped up crossroads demon with a desperation to survive and an annoyingly slick suit.

The other sees a crotchety old cripple with the usual trust issues common to all hunters.

The banter and projectile weaponry fly casually enough, but the undercurrent of tension that always precedes a deal hangs in the air.

But, ineffably, the shotgun goes down, and Crowley gets the tentative yes that’s all he needs, the balance of power shifts back exactly where he likes it.

“Excellent, so we agree. Now, all we have to do is-“

“Now wait just a god-danged minute here,” the old coot interrupts. “I am not agreeing to any jumped up deal you want without seeing it on paper first. And no fine print.”

Crowley hides a grimace in a smirk. One of the ‘clever ones’, how charming.

“Of course. Your eyes are going, I understand.”

Ten minutes and four separate arguments later, the half a pound of paperwork covered in Hell’s finest legalese that constitutes a basic ten year deal has been modified broadly, extensively, and to no effect at all other than two burgeoning headaches.

“Balls,” the hunter curses, pulling a bottle out of the desk they’ve been haggling over and popping out the cork. A smell that could compete with a hellfire and sulfur cocktail in a race to burn the hairs out of your nose wafts across the table.

“If we’re doing this, may as well make it bearable.”

“Are you planning on using that to disinfect some of this sinkhole? Because I can’t imagine any other use for what smells like 100 proof rubbing alcohol distilled from rotten sauerkraut.”

Another charming scowl fills in for a witty rejoinder. “Unless you want some, shut up and pass me that glass.”

Crowley’s gotten drunk over the looming apocalypse too often, and the company has been steadily declining.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to pass, but maybe next time you’ll have some furniture varnish we can split over a Sundae bar.”

The bottle empties, and somehow the contract negotiations move much more smoothly after that.

 

* * * * *

 

The bottle’s empty, and a couple more join it on the floor by the time to seal the deal.

Crowley doesn’t even bother to crack a joke, the Hunter’s got less buried homophobia than he’d imagine, and he’s a bit anxious to finish this and leave before the inevitable hangover and regret.

So he leans in for the kiss, and gets the expected tastes of alcohol, more alcohol and fried food as he hunts for the prize.

 

* * * * *

 

There seems to be some confusion on the proper rules of the existence, transfer, and ownership of souls.

A soul is a physical thing, as much as any tiny amount of energy can be called physical. It is spread throughout the body into every cell, making it nearly undetectable to anyone without a serious level of psychic talent. 

The absence of a soul, as most likely know, is much easier to perceive, even to those with little to no supernatural ability, reading as a fundamental wrongness in a person, or much less common, an animal.

When a soul is required to be moved, lost, or harnessed, all of these tiny particles come together to form a ball less than the size of the tip of a recently sharpened needle.

When possession of a soul is transferred, the soul is not actually lost to the person, but merely called up for the duration of the transfer ceremony, and left within the person’s body to allow them to continue to function normally.

Primarily this happens during the rare occurrences when a pair of lovers stumbles across the right combination of sweet nothings to actually hold some power, but demon deals are more common than the average person would believe.

A tiny bond is formed between the owner of the soul and the soul itself, a tiny glowing string thinner than electrons or quarks or any fundamental particle humans have yet discovered.

(Some may say this microscopic tether is what causes some lovers to glow in each other’s presence. This is, of course, ridiculous.)

 

* * * * *

 

It was this tiny thread that Crowley was slowly forming, but the energy kept flowing from all over Bobby’s body to assemble before its new owner, massing to two, three times the normal size.

It was rare, but not unheard of. …Had Crowley managed to bag himself a saint? Oh, that would be just perfect, considering he’d already agreed to let him go.

He tried to look deeper into the light, and something gave him the psychic equivalent of pissing on an electric fence.

The intoxicated hunter seemed to take his involuntary gasp as invitation to give the moderately successful literary agent a tonsillectomy.

Bond formed, and curiosity singed, Crowley set aside his new acquisition for closer examination at a later date and slipped his hand into his pocket for his iPhone.

This was just too perfect to pass up.

 

* * * * *

 

Bobby passed out almost immediately after, and Crowley did his best not to feel insulted.

He pulled out the contract one last time, made a few adjustments to the wording.

Whoops. Shouldn’t have left that open ended policy on amendments.

He frowned at the snoring hunter and the tingling sensation left in his throat, and added a few generous upgrades concerning motor function, memory,  and other things that might help save their collective bacon.

After all, he had let the man get plastered during negotiations.

He attributed it to survival instinct and a contact high from the furniture varnish.

And as the demon whisked off in search of a new suit, something inside Bobby Singer stretched out and fully woke for the first time in twenty years.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi Guys! This is apparently a chapter draft I wrote back in... fuck, idk 2013? I am seriously out of the headspace for this one, and not going to get back into it, so I am officially abandoning this. Sorry! Have 1/5th of a chapter 5 years late!

Everyone eventually reaches their own level of incompetence.

Ruling Hell is clearly Crowley’s.

The framework had been in place for quite a while, optimistic scheming to keep him sane on his downward spiral, but he hadn’t quite expected it to go this smoothly.

It took less than 24 hours to get himself seated on the throne after Sammy took his little swan dive into the cage. He attributes most of it to the fantastic PR campaign he’s been running. Seems not many people want to fuck with the guy who takes credit for taking down Satan on his championship tour.

And with the restructuring, the remodeling, the downsizing, the reassignments, and all those sardonic buzzwords Crowley picked up the businessmen of the 80’s who now ran his HR department he manages to keep his head on top by looking like he has a bold new vision for the future of Hell, Incorporated.

Which he does. It just doesn’t involve any of the busywork he’s up to down below.

But as soon as he stepped foot in Lilith’s overblown throne room, a converted shrine to her reign and patron saint, he knew two things. One, that a desk was far more useful for intimidation and ruling than a throne, and two, that his window of opportunity was incredibly small and shrinking every minute.

There are only two things to do when playing out of your class. Fold or bluff big until you can actually cover your hand.

Crowley had been out of the game for a while, holding onto survival by the skin of his teeth. In a stable environment he could have ruled Hell efficiently, effectively, and all around beautifully for millennia, building up his power before being challenged. Catch-22 was that political openings typically occurred in times that were definitively unstable.

So all in all, between kicking down rebel factions, pulling Sam and Gramps out of retirement, sorting through lieutenants he positively could not trust and could maybe trust to carry out birthday invitations, courting another line-straddlingly rebellious angel and spending way too much bloody time in the field trying to find purgatory, Bobby Singer kind of went on the back burner.

It’s not that he forgot. And it’s not that he’s ever backed out of his end of a Deal.

But there’s still something about the man’s soul that feels fundamentally different and frustratingly familiar.

Within a few months he’ll get a chance to settle down and properly examine the damn thing.

And, honestly, it’s one of the few contracts he’s still directly holding. He may have considered the fact that in a worst case situation, a little ball of indeterminate condensed soul power would not be a bad thing to keep tucked up the metaphorical sleeve.

He’ll get around to it. Eventually.

* * * * *

[A/N: He does, and it turns out that Aziraphale accidentally soul-merged with Bobby years ago when Bobby had a rough patch and almost died after his wife's... death. Now Crowley gets to deal with his longterm boyfriend being half grouchier old coot, (though he still gets his mani-pedis and reads Japanese), and Azira!Bobby gets to deal with Crowley being more... Crowley than usual and reopening old feelings of 'oh goddamn it how did I fall in love with a demon' that he thought he had handled millennia ago.]


End file.
